by Ellen Datlow
He had to save her life, but he couldn’t do it as a pigeon, nor even as an owl. Yet they were in the heart of Paris; the only other animal forms he could put on safely—cats, perhaps ducks or other small birds, insects, rats, and mice—would be equally ineffectual. If he tried to put on an eagle’s form the invisible eagles atop the Eiffel Tower would detect him and destroy him for his presumption, for all that he had a son they were raising as one of their own; if he put on a wolf’s or a dog’s form the dead who patrolled the city as German shepherds would bring him down, for only they were allowed to use canine form, and Paris had for centuries been forbidden to wolves. And if he tried to put on a bear’s body—a bear’s form would be ideal, as far as he knew he was the only shaman in France who knew how to adopt it and there’d be no way his enemy could have been prepared to deal with it, but there was also no way he could shamble the huge, conspicuous body across Paris undetected, nor anyone he could trust to transport it for him, and for all the force that being a bear would give him, the dogs would still be able to bring him down if they attacked as a pack, and he’d be vulnerable as well to humans with guns.
Unless he was willing to give up the complete separation of his two identities which he’d always maintained for his own protection, and took his costume and tambourine with him to the other apartment, and made the transformation there. The problem wasn’t just the basically trivial difficulty of explaining his clochard-self’s presence to Liz and the domestics (and that, anyway, would be no problem at all with the servants gone and Liz full of pills) but that the more people who knew he was both Eminescu Eliade and Julien de Saint-Hilaire, the less safe he was. Both identities were, of course, registered with the Ordre des médecins and there were a very few of his French psychiatric colleagues who knew him as both, though most knew only that he was both shaman and psychiatrist, but those few who did know were all men to whom he’d chosen to reveal himself because he was satisfied they posed no real threat to him, while at the same time they knew he in turn would never threaten them, thus rendering mutual trust possible. The clochards with whom he spent his time as Eminescu Eliade, of course, knew that he was a shaman, just as he knew which among them were also shamans, but though they knew that he had to have some sort of second identity, none of them, as far as he was aware, knew that that second identity was that of Julien de Saint-Hilaire. Thus none of them could attack him while he was in his psychiatrist’s role, far from his caps, costume and drum, and so virtually defenseless.
It was Julien de Saint-Hilaire, and not Eminescu Eliade, who’d been challenged and who was under attack. Yet even so he knew that as long as he kept his unknown enemy from learning that the two were one and the same (and his opponent couldn’t know that yet, or Eminescu would have already been dead) Eminescu Eliade would remain, if not safe, at least always free to escape to safety and anonymity. All of which would be lost if the other caught him taking his costume and drum to the other apartment.
Lost, unless he could destroy the worms in Liz and get his shamanizing aids back to the rue de Condé before the other realized what Eminescu was doing. Or unless he managed to kill the other before he’d had a chance to make use of the information he’d gained, and before he’d had a chance to reveal it to anyone else.
And Eminescu was tired of having to defend himself, of worrying about his safety, tired and very angry. He wanted to hurt his enemy, not just avoid him or survive his attacks. The other had to have a lot of his power—and that meant a lot of his soul—in the worms: If Eminescu could destroy them he might well cripple his enemy so that he could finish him off later, at his leisure. And too, this was the only way he could save Liz, and his unborn son.
He took his father’s skull from the silver hatbox in the trunk, held it out at arm’s length with both hands and asked it whether or not he’d succeed in saving Liz without betraying himself to his enemy. There was no reply, the skull became neither lighter nor heavier, but that proved nothing: His father rarely responded and those few times that the skull’s weight had seemed to change Eminescu had been unable to rule out the possibility that the brief alteration in its heaviness he’d felt had been no more than the result of unconscious suggestion, like the messages he’d seen Liz seem to receive when she played with her Ouija board.
He put the skull and the rest of his shamanizing equipment back in the trunk and locked it, then went downstairs as Julien de Saint-Hilaire. He ate yet another two meals at nearby restaurants, then found the concierge’s husband and got him to help move the heavy steamer trunk downstairs. Back at the other apartment he tipped the taxi driver who’d brought him there substantially extra to help carry the trunk up the rear stairs. When the driver left he dragged it into the apartment and locked it in the unused spare bedroom at the far end of the apartment, where Liz was least likely to be disturbed by the noise he’d make beating his tambourine and chanting, and where she was least likely to realize that a door to which she’d never had the key was now locked against her.
She was still in the bedroom, asleep. He called his catering service and asked them to deliver cold cuts for a party of fifteen in an hour, then went downstairs and bought a side of beef and a half dozen chickens from his butcher. The butcher and his two assistants helped him up the stairs and into the kitchen with the meat. When they were gone he dragged the beef into the spare bedroom, followed it with the chickens.
The caterers managed to deliver the cold cuts without waking Liz. He ate some of them, laid the others out where he’d be able to get at them easily when he made the transformation back to human, though since he wouldn’t be flying he at least wouldn’t have to waste the kinds of energy it took to get his iron-weighted body airborne. Then he locked all the doors and windows carefully and turned off the phone and doorbell, so as to make sure that nothing disturbed or awakened Liz before he was finished with her.
It was good to put his caps and costume on in the Parc Monceau apartment for the first time, good to beat his tambourine there in the spare room with the late-afternoon sun coming in through the curtains screening the window. Good to put on the bear’s form after so many years of forcing himself to stay content with being no more than a pigeon or owl or rat. It had been fifteen—no, seventeen—years since he’d last been a bear, there in that box canyon in Arizona with John Henry Two Feathers Thomas Thompson, and he’d forgotten what joy it was to be huge and shaggy and powerful, forgotten the bear’s keen intelligence and cunning, the enormous reserves of strength its anger gave it.
Forgotten too the danger of losing himself in the bear, of letting the seeming inexhaustibility of the forces at his disposal seduce him into going too far beyond his limits, so that when the time came for him to resume his human form he’d lack the energy to animate his body and so die.
Outside a dog began to bark, and then another. He couldn’t tell if they were just dogs barking, or some of the dead who’d detected his transformation, but even if they were just dogs they were a reminder that the longer he stayed a bear the more chance there was that his enemy would detect him, realize what he was doing and counterattack.
More dogs, a growing number of them living animals now, howling all around his building and even within it: He recognized the excited voices of the thirteen whippets the film distributor on the first floor kept, the sharp yapping of the old lady on the second floor’s gray poodle and the deeper and stupider baying of her middle-aged daughter’s obnoxious Irish setter. Lights were beginning to go on in other buildings. Which meant he had to hurry, leave the meat and chickens he’d planned to eat before he began for later, so he could get to Liz and soothe her immediately, before even drugged as she was the noise woke her.
Soothe her and then destroy the worms before the disturbance the dead were making brought his enemy. If he wasn’t already here, or coming.
He’d left the door to the room he was using slightly ajar. Now he pushed it open with his snout, squeezed through the narrow doorway and shambled down the long hall toward the
master bedroom. He was already hungry, though he still had some margin before he’d be in danger.
Halfway down the hall to the bedroom he knocked a tall glass lamp from a table. It hit the parquet floor and shattered loudly, and for a moment he was sure that the noise would be enough to awaken Liz after all: She metabolized her sleeping pills very rapidly and would already be beginning to get over the effects of the ones he’d given her. But when he reached the bedroom and poked his head in to check on her she was still asleep, though the howling outside and within the building was still getting louder and louder. There had to be fifty or sixty dogs out there by now, perhaps even more.
He shambled the rest of the way into the room, reared up and balanced himself on his hind legs at the foot of the bed, then reached out and plucked Liz’s soul from her body, locked it away from all pain and sensation in her head. As though her skull were a mother’s womb inside which she lay curled like a haggard but voluptuous foetus, her whole adult body there within her head, filling it and overflowing it slightly, one hand dangling from her right ear, a foot and ankle and short length of calf protruding from her half-open mouth.
He turned her over with his paws and made a quick incision in her belly with his long claws, pulled the flesh apart so he could reach in and flip her intestines free of her abdomen. He ripped them open and seized the worms in his teeth, ripped them free of her intestinal walls and then tore them apart, killing the scolexes and each and every segment before he swallowed them. It was easy, amazingly easy, like the time John Henry Two Feathers Thomas Thompson had taught him to flip trout from a stream with his paws, and though the tapeworms were lampreys as well as worms they couldn’t get a grasp on his shaggy body with their sucking mouths, their concentric circles of razor-sharp rasping teeth, so it was only a matter of moments before he’d killed them all and devoured their dead bodies.
All eight of them, where there should have been nine.
He cursed himself for the way he’d let the noise the dogs were making outside the apartment rush him into beginning without examining Liz very, very carefully again first, realized that at no time since he’d returned from the Undercity had he thought to count the worms in her belly, that he’d just assumed that all nine were still there.
But there was no time now to try to solve the problem of the ninth worm’s escape or disappearance; he had to try to get Liz’s intestines back together and inside her and functioning before she bled to death, and before the hunger growing ever more insistent within him reached the point where it could be fatal.
He licked the insides of her intestines clean with his long tongue, making sure he got each and every egg and embryo and crushed the life out of them between his teeth before he swallowed them. Then he pushed the ripped intestines back into shape with his nose and tongue, licked them until they’d stopped bleeding and begun to heal, licked them a little more and then nosed them back into place in her abdominal cavity, licked the incision in her belly until it closed and healed, continued to lick it until no further trace of its presence remained.
Then he reached into her legs and bloodstream, pulled the embryos and filament worms he found there from her body, killed and devoured them.
And it had been easy, almost too easy. He would have thought the whole thing another diversion, only a means of luring him here in his shaman’s self, had it not been for the fact that there was no one else in France who knew he was able to take on the form of a bear. There were very few people left anywhere in Europe who knew how to do so, and those few were all far to the North, in the Scandinavian countries.
Besides, there was still the missing tapeworm to consider.
Liz’s soul still filled her head. He very carefully checked her body to make sure it was now free of worms, eggs, embryos, and toxins before he released her soul, let it begin slowly filtering down out of her head into the rest of her body.
The veins in her legs were still blue and fat, undoubtedly painful: The filament worms had damaged all the tiny valves in the vessels that kept the blood from pooling there. But all that was, now that the worms had been removed, was ordinary varicose veins; he should be able to heal them easily enough, and if they proved for some reason more difficult to deal with than he expected them to be he could always steal healthy veins from other people’s legs for her. From that patient who was so late paying his bills, if his blood type was right and his circulatory system in good condition.
His hunger had passed the danger point, especially with his human form weakened as it was by his previous efforts, but he forced himself to go over the bedroom and both the attached bathrooms meticulously, looking for the ninth worm. It wasn’t there. Perhaps the medicines he’d given Liz had destroyed it; perhaps the first worm’s death had been the signal which had stimulated the other worms to their accelerated egg production. In any case, the worm was gone.
Liz was sleeping soundly now, would remain asleep for another five or six hours while her soul reintegrated itself with her body. More than long enough for him to change the bloodstained sheets and blankets and mattress cover.
He fell once on his way back through the corridor to the spare bedroom, got a good look at himself in the hall mirror as he was getting back up. He looked almost dead of starvation, a bit like a weasel or wolverine, but with neither the sleekness nor the grace.
He made it back into the spare bedroom and pushed the door closed behind him, though he had no way to lock it before he regained his human form. He devoured the cold cuts on their platter, ate the chickens and began ripping chunks of meat from the side of beef.
And when he’d cracked open the last bone and licked it clean of the last of the marrow it had contained he triggered his transformation.
He lay there, Eminescu Eliade, too tired to move or do anything else, just letting the strength begin flowing gently back into him from his caps and costume. There’d been enough energy in the food he’d eaten to keep him alive, just barely enough, but it would be a while before he’d be strong enough to pull his tambourine to him, tap out the rhythms on it he could use to summon the strength he’d need to get to his feet and change back into Julien de Saint-Hilaire, then get something more to eat from the kitchen and finally clean up Liz and the bed.
Everything was silent, completely silent, both within the apartment and outside. He had a throbbing pain in his head and he felt dizzy and a little nauseated and very hungry. The floor was too hard for him now that he’d lost the flesh that had formerly cushioned his bones and it hurt him even through his many layers of swaddling clothing. He’d have to find a way to explain to Liz the twenty kilos or more he’d lost so suddenly.
He lay there, half-dozing, letting the strength return to him.
And then he must have passed out, because when he opened his eyes again Liz was kneeling over him, still covered with dry blood but dressed now, her robe wrapped around her. He tried to tell her something, he wasn’t sure quite what, but she shook her head and put her fingers to her lips. She was smiling, but it was a strange, tight-lipped smile and he felt confused.
The door opened behind him, letting in a current of cold air. Jean-Luc and Michel came in together, holding hands.
Liz snatched Eminescu’s two caps from his head and put them on her own before he’d had a chance to realize what she was doing, and by then it was too late to even try to change himself back into a bear, or into anything else.
She motioned to Jean-Luc and Michel. They bent down to kiss her on both cheeks in greeting while she did the same to them, then took up their positions, Jean-Luc kneeling across from her on the opposite side of Eminescu’s body, Michel down by his feet. Jean-Luc helped her strip Eminescu’s leather coat from him while Michel took his seven-league shoes and his socks from his feet. Without his caps he had no strength with which to even try to resist them, and with each article and layer of clothing they stripped from him he was weaker still, until at the end he no longer had the strength to so much as lift his head.
W
hen he was naked and shivering in the cold air Liz took off her robe and gave it to Jean-Luc to hold while she dressed herself in Eminescu’s many layers of rags. Then together she and Jean-Luc wrapped him in her discarded robe while Michel picked up Eminescu’s tambourine and began to beat it.
Naked and weakened as he was, he could sense nothing of the power they were summoning and using. He had never felt it, not even in the end, never detected in any of them the slightest sign of the power that had defeated and destroyed him, and in a way that was almost as bad as the fact of the defeat itself, that he would never know if Liz or one of the other two had been his true enemy, keeping his or her powers hidden from Eminescu in some way he would never now get the chance to understand, or if all three of them together had been only the instrument for some challenger whose identity he would never know.
Liz knelt down beside him again, pulled the beard from his face and put it on her own. She leaned over him then, began nuzzling his cheek and then kissing him on the mouth.
Without ceasing to kiss him she brought her hands up, jammed her fingers into his mouth and pried it wide, held his jaw open despite his feeble efforts to close it while she stuck her tongue in his mouth.
Her tongue explored his mouth, then uncoiled its flat, twelve-meter body and slid slowly down his throat into its new home.
